Tara-Nicholle Nelson is the Founder + CEO of RETHINK Multimedia, where she and her team help health and personal finance brands engage with transformation-craving users via her visionary Transformational Consumer℠ Trend Reports and Consulting, and Business Class BiblioTherapy℠ Experiences.
Tara teaches tools for tapping into transformation - for business and life - at www.RETHINK7.com. Tara is also the Strategic Advisor on Digital + Content at San Francisco's SutherlandGold Group.

Chip Conley: Why The Best CEOs Are "Vulnerable Visionaries"

In 2008, by all accounts, Chip Conley was a bestselling author and the visionary pioneer of the boutique hotel industry, which he kick-started 25 years ago as the Founder of the Joie de Vivre Hotel chain. Conley’s startup story is now iconic – as a 26-year old, he bought a seedy, hourly-rate motel and reinvented it into the rockstar-favorite Phoenix Hotel, then scaled that model into a 35-property chain. But when the recession decimated the travel industry and his undercapitalized company’s revenues, Conley found himself, his C-Suite colleagues and many of their employees diving into deep depression and emotional despair – neither of which are optimal for figuring out how to execute a turnaround.

After a series of friends committed suicide and his own heart flatlined, felling him onstage during a speech, Conley told the audience at the recent LOHAS Forum, he grew desperate for direction. Coming across Victor Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Conley became enthralled with the idea that Frankl was able to seize control over his emotions and take intentional actions to cultivate meaning and fulfill the higher level human need for self-actualization, even while immersed in the horrific factual backdrop of the Nazi death camps where he lost his entire family.

Inspired, Conley went on a mission to understand and develop a systematic approach to happiness and other emotions, travelling the world and conferring with a mind-boggling, interdisciplinary array of experts. The result? A set of 18 ‘Emotional Equations,’ from “Despair = Suffering – Meaning” to “Happiness = Wanting What You Have ÷ Having What You Want.” Conley first taught these equations to his team at JdV, stabilizing and soon selling the company – then shared them with us all via his latest bestselling book, Emotional Equations: Simple Truths for Creating Happiness and Success (Free Press, 2012).

Backstage at the LOHAS Forum, Conley and I sat down to discuss how business leaders can – and must – develop emotional management skills if they want their companies to survive market vagaries and prosper, organizationally and in terms of the bottom line. Three takeaways:

1. In the best organizations, leaders take responsibility for the emotions, or “motivational hygiene,” of their teams. ”[Maslow coined an] interesting phrase: “motivational hygiene”. It’s odd, but I love it. It says essentially that we are responsible, in organizations, for creating an environment for people that’s clean, comfortable and healthy — on a psychological and emotional basis. The best organizations — if you look at the best places to work, the most admired companies, companies that actually have good long-term reliability — generally speaking I think they have the motivational hygiene right most of the time. I think this is part of what good senior executives do. Because when you are looking at questions like:

“How do you create talent?”

“How do you attract talent?”

“How do you become a magnet?”

you have to look at what emotional effects your culture has on people.

So these are new questions, but they are questions that Maslow helped me understand, in terms of creating an organizational theory. There are the basic needs, and then there are the higher needs. And generally speaking companies have gotten pretty good with the basic needs and they kind of neglected the higher needs. Now, we’re starting to see more conscious capitalist companies that are trying to adjust to the full pyramid of needs.”

2. Learning how to use Emotional Equations to manage your own feelings makes you a better leader. “What we’re unconscious of tends to have power over us. And many of us are really unconscious of what’s going inside of us emotionally – we know something’s not working, we are upset about something but it hard to put words to what it is and be able to articulate what’s going on, you just know there’s something painful or difficult. When you are this walking question mark, emotionally, around your company around in your own life – it’s like wearing a bad pair of glasses: you’re trying to make sense of the world but you don’t have the lenses that are appropriate for you to understand what’s going on.

So, leaders who have strong awareness of what’s going on inside of them, and ability to influence what’s going on inside of them, are in a position to be better role models, better leaders.

But being emotionally aware is just the first step. The reason I turned it into emotional equations is really trying to take something profound (Frankl’s insights) and make it practically useful on a day-to-day basis. Turning it into equations — making it about math — works because math is solution-driven.

Now when it comes to emotion, the precision can only be so good because emotions are so messy and not meant to be perfectly precise, But when I was trying to understand the relationship between a variety of emotions, what helped me with despair was understanding that suffering is always going to be around and that meaning is something that I can put an intention upon and if I increase the meaning I’ll have less despair because meaning and despair are inversely proportional.

I think this is quite relevant to how you lead a company, and how you get an organization to feel a sense of shared meaning. (During the recession,) I expressed that first, despair equation to the leaders in my company and they were like bees to honey.”

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